Peddie EXP Summer 2018

My last week was actually one of my most fun. I had pretty much finished with my research and was working on a presentation that I had to do for the Provost Program. This gave me a lot more free time, and I spent it hanging out with friends and generally enjoying my last days in Newark. I went out to lunch with Jaqueline, one of my friends who was also working at NJIT, pretty much every day, and our cuisine ranged from the food truck right outside the building to a place that served exclusively meatballs. I actually became really fond of Newark in my stay there. It’s definitely not as bad as people make it out to be, and there are a lot of parts about it that are good, or just funny. Since I went on daily walks for pretty much my entire stay, I knew the layout of the city very well, and had explored a lot (but only in the not-sketchy areas). I, of course, had my favorite walking path, which had many of the nicest views in the city. I also really liked some of the quirkier things a...

The final week of my lab was mostly uneventful because Bing had closed for the summer. The lab had sent out requests for parents to bring their children in voluntarily for research, probably with promises of cash, and the research assistants should only show up during the times that were booked by the parents. Therefore, I had more freedom and better control of the schedule since I could show up for the allotted time rather than staying for three hours waiting for Isabel to recruit children. This week's lab meeting was also the research assistant's turn to present their summer works. The lab meetings are usually done by the graduate students, but since most of the research assistants have programs that link to the lab (such as how I'm at the lab because of EXP) and most of us have to present for our programs, the lab thought it was a good opportunity for us to receive feedbacks and practice for future presentations. The meeting was attended by the whole lab, including the...

Despite being my last week, it was a rather busy week of a lot of different things. Kyu, my postdoc, had a lab meeting on Wednesday, and he wanted to include what I did over the summer. So, following the analysis of the brain slices, I gathered all the data and made some neat graphs to summarize all the histological work I did. I was in a bit of awe when I saw that so much work could be summarized in 2 small graphs. At the same time, it added a lot of closure and gave me a sense of accomplishment, but I digress. Regarding the code I wrote up, I continued to tweak it, annotate it, and even made 2 other versions that slightly differed in its use. For all of these, I wrote up a protocol so that the lab could use it when I’m gone L . Kyu, hoping to make my last week memorable, asked me what I wanted to do. I responded with “perfusions” (albeit how gorey, it’s really interesting). Little did I know, he had to perfuse all the mice he had been running behavior on for the past mon...

For my final week at my lab, I began by continuing my work with antibodies and immunofluorescence. Because we have not seen any positive results with SERT, we have moved on to looking at other antibodies. This week, I began working with the protein CCK. CCK, or cholecystokinin, is responsible for initiating digestion in the small intestine. On the round of CCK that we did, we got some very promising results in the disparity of infected and uninfected slides. On my last day at my lab, my PI came back from his conference in London and took our whole lab out to lunch. We got to hear about all of the new scientific discoveries that were discussed at his conference, which was extremely interesting and we talked a lot about new projects that the lab could explore. Everyone in my lab was so nice this summer and I really appreciated them taking the time to take me out to lunch. We went to a deli in Georgetown and ate on top of the Car Barn, which is part of the Georgetown business school. ...